The Gunman with a Thousand Names
by McJunker
Summary: Desperate to end the threat posed by the Batman, the criminal gangs of Gotham hire an ex-KGB hitman with a new plan of how to kill the Bat.
1. Chapter 1

The Batman had been terrorizing the criminal empires of Gotham for just over a year. The Batman had busted up three major drug smuggling rings, broken the Irish mob's gunrunning schemes in Gotham harbor, taken down three capos in the Italian mafia along with twenty of their street level soldiers, exposed three corrupt politicians, and interrupted two bank robberies in progress. This tally does not take into account the many petty thieves, muggers and dealers he had neutralized but who had no effect on the grander scheme of things in Gotham.

More than all that, though. Every thug he took down was taken with incriminating evidence. Every capo and boss and gang leader who went to trial because of the Bat was convicted in a court of law. In a city like Gotham, that was unheard of.

And all of it was down without a single confirmed fatality.

In times of crisis, crime syndicates call in their troubleshooters.

* * *

Grovenor leaned in close across the table and said, "The Batman is a myth."

Brezhnev leaned in close and said, "No, he fucking isn't."

They were in a small café in the middle of a relatively good neighborhood; Grovenor was sipping hot tea from a small cup and Brezhnev was smearing cream cheese into a sourdough bagel. The area was considered by many of the ignorant taxpayers to be good because there wasn't graffiti and trash everywhere and the concrete wasn't destroyed. Gang violence was rare and you could leave your car there overnight without worrying.

There was no graffiti because the last tagger Brezhnev caught was found in three different trash bins. The upkeep of the area was because Brezhnev owned two city councilmen outright and liked an orderly neighborhood. And there was no violence or petty vandalism because Russians know better than to shit where you eat.

Brezhnev took a massive bite and sat back, breathing heavily through his nose. He wiped some cream cheese out of his mustache and said. "The Batman is no myth. I have seen him. With my own eyes."

Grovenor said, "Tell me."

"This was about two months ago. We were down the docks, Vasily and I. The blacks, they had shot at some of my men who were selling product near their territory. I had ordered two of the blacks shot in retaliation, and so I expected a war with them. And who do you go to when you are about to go to war?"

"The Irish."

"Yes. So, Vasily and I were down at Pier 11 meeting with the Irish. They had imported some grenade launchers from who knows were, and were anxious to get them off their hands before whoever they robbed came looking for their merchandise. They also had my resupply of 7.62 ammunition."

"Okay."

"Just after they had packed the last crate into my truck, I was giving them the money."

"Wait, you brought the money to the pick up site?" Grovenor raised one eyebrow. The Brezhnev he knew wouldn't take that risk.

"I trust Johnny Farrow not to fuck me. I make him rich, and make him look good in front of his bosses. He will not kill a goose that shits gold just for a good dinner."

Grovenor said, "Okay. Continue."

"I handed off the briefcase of cash to Johnny and was just saying my farewells when the lights went out in the warehouse. The lights went out, and I hit the floor and rolled between the connexes to my right. I heard someone scream."

Brezhnev fell silent. After a moment, he took another bite of his bagel and chewed slowly, staring at the table top.

Grovenor didn't press him.

"It was like I was back in Afghanistan. Transported back in time in a blink of an eye. The Irishmen were shooting at shadows, screaming at random. The muzzle flashes blinded me, removing my night vision. I low crawled toward the door along the wall. I did not wish to meet whoever had killed the lights, and I knew the Irish would kill me by accident if they saw me walking. I got to the door and sprinted for the edge of the pier. I swam, perhaps, three hundred meters south to Pier 12. The next day, I found out that all the cash and merchandise was confiscated, and all six Irishmen were arrested, as was Vasily. _Someone_ had worked them over. Professionally, even. There were bruised organs, broken wrists, ribs, collar bones, that sort of thing. But nothing fatal. And somehow the police knew exactly when to show up after the Bat left."

Grovenor finished off his tea and began refilling from the ornate porcelain pot. "But you said saw him."

"Yes. Before I reached the outer doors of the warehouse, I turned to check my rear. I saw him. He had crept up on one of the Irishmen. I think it was Tom Roy. Johnny's cousin."

"I've never met him."

"Of course. He was shooting his Armalite, though at what, I could not say. The flashes silhouetted him against the shadows. I turned and watched as the Bat throttled him from behind and dragged him away into the darkness."

"You didn't shoot? You trusted Johnny enough to not bring a piece?"

Brezhnev shook his head. "I was armed."

"Then why didn't you shoot?" Grovenor's eyes bored into Brezhnev's. There was an accusation there. Confusion, too. Brezhnev shrank from it.

"I don't know," he said. "I had my pistol out, of course. But when I turned and saw him, I froze. I couldn't shoot."

"Why not?"

"What if I missed? I was almost out of it. If I shot, he'd see me. And then I'd be the one dragged off into darkness. By the time I had my sights lined up, he was gone. As was Tom Roy. It was like they'd never been there at all. Just like a sentry on a night guard when the _mujahedeen_ come."

Grovenor frowned and scratched his head to gain a few moments to think. "Alright. Describe him for me."

Without a second's delay, Brezhnev rattled off the information. He was tall, over six feet, though he might have worn boots. He had worn a cloak, but he seemed to have a fairly broad chest underneath it. He wore a mask with two horns or long ears to disguise his face, though Brezhnev thought he caught a glimpse of white jaw line. He moved like an athlete, as good as if not better than a Spetsnaz. He hadn't been carrying any gun that could be seen.

"Alright," Grovenor said. "So we're looking for a white male, approximately six feet tall, broad shouldered, athletic. That narrows it down a bit."

"Well, fuck you too, Grovenor, or whatever you choose to call yourself this year. It was dark and he was quick. I had no time to ask him to pose for mug shot."

"Understood. However, I'm afraid you misunderstood my when I said that the Batman is a myth. I do not believe that Gotham's underworld has had a collective hallucination."

"Tell me."

Grovenor tapped his forehead and nodded. His mouth quirked up in a knowing smile.

Brezhnev said nothing. When a man like Brezhnev chooses to say nothing, the silence is deafening and one has trouble looking him in the eye.

Grovenor was made of sterner stuff, though. "Allow to explain. I believe that the idea of a supernatural creature of the night who has chosen to wreak havoc among the criminals of Gotham is ridiculous. More over, I believe the idea of a single man, a single vigilante, enjoying that level of success is also ridiculous. The Batman is a highly skilled, highly trained, well funded operation. He is a team of American Special Forces, working in conjunction with some spook show from start to finish."

"Impossible."

"Far from it. It is the most rational answer. Do you truly believe that there was only one man ghosting the Irishmen that night?"

Brezhnev bit his thumb and thought, his eyes never leaving Grovenor's. Grovenor removed his smart phone from his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, then flipped it around and slid it across the table. He returned to his beverage while Brezhnev scanned the screen.

It was a story from the Gotham Times, from back when the Batman was just a quirky sideline, one that could fill in space during a slow news week. Giant Bat Attacks Local Toughs: Fact or Fiction? That sort of thing.

Brezhnev asked, "And what is this?"

"Go to the last paragraph. Kid named Waylon Jones swears that he shot the Bat twice, but it didn't kill him."

"Ah?"

"I say that's bullshit. Jones shot someone twice, but because there's another bat attack the next day everyone assumes he missed. Or they think the Bat is immune to bullets. I say that a member of the Special Forces unit _was_ hit, but his team kept on with the mission."

Brezhnev snorted with obvious contempt. "I've never known a black who knew what the sights on his gun were used for. And all the blackasses in this city are very quick to claim a body count whether they earned it or not."

"True, but irrelevant. The Batman has been fighting in this city for a year- unarmed, too!- and in that time he has never once been hit? Never twisted his ankle? Never broken a rib? Let me tell you a little bed time story, Brezhnev."

Slowly, over the course of the next hour, Grovenor laid out his case. This is the image he painted.

Gotham is known worldwide for being at the top of all the wrong lists. Drug addiction, gang violence, petty crime, poverty, political corruption. You needed to go to an actual war zone to find higher levels of gun violence, to visit Colombia or Afghanistan to find more drug trafficking, to visit Thailand or Korea to find more prostitution. When it comes to sin and suffering, Gotham was a jack of all trades.

Enter the CIA. Or the Department of Homeland Security. Or the FBI. The actual organization doesn't matter, they are all spooks. They know of the connections that bind organized crime to the drug trade, the drug trade to terrorism. They see Gotham as America's Achilles Heel, and they decide to do something about it. This was the beginning of "Operation Bat". They bring in the Navy SEALs, or Delta Force, or whoever they had on tap. Call it a team of ten guys. Maybe more, but not possibly less.

Their prescribed tactics would be the same as they'd use in a real war- they'd slip into a region and begin destabilizing the local warlord through lightning raids, sabotage, and the removal of high value targets. They'd remain shadows, unseen until they were ready, invulnerable to counter attack because the enemy would never know where they rest their heads. They would terrorize the warlord's soldiers, demoralize them, pick them off one by one. And when the warlord's grip was loosened in a given area, they'd work with the new government to hold on to the freed territory. They'd support the new pro-American forces to keep the old regime's influence at bay.

"Does this sound familiar, friend?"

Brezhnev closed his eyes and shook his head. "_Chyort_, what a fucking disaster."

"Yes."

"One thing though. The Batman- this special forces team- they have not fired a single shot. Why aren't they using their guns?"

"_I _don't know, I'm not in charge of them."

"I've never heard of Green Berets being gun shy."

"If I had to guess- and this is only a guess, because I don't know- if I had to guess, they want to keep this on the down low. The spooks cannot afford to tell their citizens that they are attacking and imprisoning American citizens under false pretexts, and without warrants or a court's supervision. The Americans get anxious when they hear of Iraqis and Afghans being dragged away to Cuba. They wouldn't tolerate citizens receiving that treatment too."

"Reasonable."

"And they can't keep it quiet if there's a blood bath every week. Or if there's another Mogadishu down in the Narrows."

"So these operatives are then ordered to not use guns. Doesn't seem likely."

"Maybe not. But I don't need to know every detail about their plan to beat them."

Brezhnev let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Then you'll do it."

"Of course."

"How?"

"The same way anyone gets rid of the Americans. Kill a couple, cause an ugly scene, and they'll withdraw on their own when the home front collapses. That's how the Viet Cong beat them. That's how the Somalians beat them. And it's how I will beat them."

"When?"

"As soon as I can. I must go set the wheels turning. Thank you for the tea."

"Of course."

* * *

Few people knew the history of the man calling himself Grovenor, and none now living knew all of it.

He was a KGB trained Cold War throwback. While he had been born outside of the Soviet Union, his parents were ardent communists who had briefly worked as telegraphers for the Russians in the Second World War. By the age of 16 he was used as a mule for a local Soviet spy network, carrying messages and packages between conspirators. Being both cunning and ruthless, his rise through the ranks brought more intensive training and greater responsibilities.

Under another name, he had made a small reputation for himself among the western intelligence services when he assassinated a Soviet defector before she could cross the Berlin Wall to sanctuary. Under that same name he had cracked a British spy network in Leningrad.

His real claim to fame was in October of 1980, almost a year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when he and six other gunmen aborted a CIA financed counter coup. Three agents were killed and two others were captured alive and sent to Moscow to have their minds wrung dry. Three months later a hit team tried for him in Kabul and failed.

He spent the next seven years in Afghanistan, working under the name of Ivan Kuznetsov- a sham meant only to hide his real name, it being the rough Russian equivalent of a CIA agent introducing himself as John Smith. His tasks were to hunt down the _mujahedeen_ with the Spetsnaz to back him up, and to scour around for solid evidence that the CIA were funding them. This is where his relationship with Benedikt Brezhnev began.

However, after the Soviet Union collapsed the man now calling himself Grovenor vanished. This surprised no one on either side of the Iron Curtain. He had dozens of fake IDs, birth certificates, passports, and other tools of espionage, as well as numerous contacts in the underworld to provide him with more on demand. In addition to Russian and Pashto, he spoke Spanish, German, French, and English with a midwest American dialect. His fingerprints he had burned off more than a decade ago. A manhunt on either side might have found him before he disappeared, but there was no motive to look for him in particular.

He himself felt like an old man, though he was younger than fifty. He had all his youthful enthusiasm ground out by more than twenty years of fighting the secret war against the West, and the man who crossed the Berlin Wall to the free world had not a shred of ideology left in him. But training and instinct remain long after the motivation is gone. The world still required men to play the game, and would pay top dollar for an experienced gunman like him.

The only thing that really interested Grovenor by the time his old friend Brezhnev contacted him with a Bat problem was proving that he was still the best in the game.


	2. Chapter 2

If you couldn't find where the _mujahedeen _were, you made them come to you.

The trick lay in finding fresh enough bait to lure the Special Forces into investigating, and then to lay out a path for them clear enough to follow, yet low-key enough that they wouldn't smell the ambush at the end of it.

During the planning process, Grovenor felt like he was back in the secret war again. The game was too alluring, too wild, too exhilarating to ever bear to leave for long. The thrill came in imagining a plausible storyline to sell the other team, something close enough to the truth to feel convincing. But the real art was setting things up to force the enemy to uncover the story themselves- to make them work and strive for every piece of the puzzle that was constructed just for them. Once they find every clue you left out for them, they will sell your fiction to themselves. And that's when they are in your power. Grovenor recalled that he'd once had British Intelligence convinced that there was a double agent imbedded among MI-6 leadership. All he had to do is dump a hundred thousand pounds into a British Bank under a fake name, and leak a few diplomatic cables. The resulting storm of paranoia and distrust among the elite intelligence of Britain neutralized English plots for two years.

In this case, he had to first catch the Bat's eye. That was step one. And the one thing every government agent hated was a cop killer.

* * *

Brezhnev had provided him with the materials he'd needed- one junker car with a false bottom, a plastic baggie half full of cocaine, and three pistols and a shotgun with reliable men to shoot them. All that was camouflage. The actual important part Grovenor printed out from a public library.

After careful deliberation, Grovenor selected the intersection at 43rd and Warren, just four blocks south from the legendary Crime Alley. It was in one of the shittier parts of Gotham, one of the few districts where none of the crime was organized- mostly muggings, low intensity drug trafficking, domestic violence, and the like. This meant that police were likely to patrol there vigorously, as there would be no pressure put on them from above to ignore what they saw.

As he scouted out 43rd and Warren, Grovenor assembled his assests into a story:

Once upon a time in Gotham City, four hoods were driving down the street. They were high on coke, sampling their own product they had hidden in the car, and they weren't paying attention to their surroundings. They rear ended a police car going almost forty miles an hour down a residential street.

They panicked. None of them could walk in a straight line, let alone pass a sobriety test. Not to mention the unregistered firearms. And they all worked for some hard bosses, men who wouldn't look kindly on them for being busted for something so stupid.

They piled out of the car, shouting at loud for passers by to hear how confused and desperate they were. They drew their weapons and shot the two disoriented cops. They took off on foot into Crime Alley, where they disappeared into the narrow, twisted maze of alleyways that generations of Gotham hoodlums had used to escape justice.

The responding officers arrive on the scene, sealing it off, bagging and tagging the corpses, interviewing witnesses, and so on and so forth. A search of the impounded car revealed the cocaine in the false bottom, as well as a ripped up piece of paper found in the driver's seat beneath the brake pedal: directions, printed off Mapquest. The gunmen had been heading to a warehouse on the west side.

There was no possible way the police would fail to investigate the address that Grovenor had planted for them. The question now was how to push this case from the police's case load to the Bat's. What would they find there at the warehouse? Documents refering to a massive influx of arms from the docks? Evidence of a corrupt politician? Perhaps a human trafficking ring?

No, Grovenor decided. All those scenarios ran the risk of the local police taking care of it in house. How to bring the Special Forces soldiers out into the open?

Terrorism. That's the ticket. Get a laptop and fill it with emails referencing men that Grovenor knew were connected to al Qaeda, and the search history stacked with websites teaching how to make bombs in your bathtub. Trace elements of IED materials in the bathroom sink. It couldn't be obvious, though. You couldn't just lay the fake evidence in a briefcase on the kitchen table with a note saying "PRIVATE TERRORIST NOTES, COPS DON'T OPEN". It had to be subtle. You had to force the oppostion to figure out on their own. Otherwise they'd never believe it.

As he drove back from 43rd and Warren, Grovenor called Brezhnev on his prepaid, disposable cell. It went to voicemail. Grovenor used his sunniest Midwestern American accent and feigned that he'd dialed the wrong number and didn't realize it.

"Hey John, it's me, Casey. Look, Uncle Bateman is coming into town soon, so we might have to have the party earlier. Call it, uh, one week to get the place ready for him, you know, set up a room for him to stay at, then we'll, uh, you know, take him out for a night on the town. So yeah. See you when I see you, bud!"

As he drove down the street, going two miles below the speed limit, Grovenor tossed the cell out the window into a storm drain.

* * *

Grovenor was alone in Brezhnev's safehouse on the other side of Gotham from 43rd and Warren, hunched over on a purple plush couch waiting for his new cell to ring. The television was blaring, showing some youth based talk show with lots of garish, decadent Western bullshit. Such mindless preoccupation with looking cool, partying, and following the rules of the most morally bankrupt subculture the world had ever seen. Grovenor barely noticed what was being shouted over the noisy dance music on the soundtrack. He just wanted mindless noise in the background to drown out the sounds of isolation.

One way or another, he had always been alone. He had long ago learned the trick of keeping himself to himself, hiding his feelings on the inside and a blank face on the outside for the world to bounce off of. His thoughts could then stream in protected tunnels beneath his mask, free from outside interference. It was a useful and effective mindset, and Grovenor consider it one of his greatest assests. He had dealt with so many amatuers over the years- men and women who couldn't lie, or felt compassion for the people they were supposed to be exploiting, or who let their emotions affect the task at hand. Grovenor could modulate his mood so avoid such mistakes. He wasn't inhuman. He too felt rage, fear, pity. He just never showed it or let it dictate his actions.

The cell rang.

"Hello?"

"Done." The voice was hard, even cruel. Grovenor placed it as Ivan, one of Brezhnev's many ex-Spetsnaz enforcers.

"Any hang ups?"

"Dmitri broke his nose in the collision, but otherwise the plan went like clockwork."

Grovenor's spine jerked into rigidity. His voice did not show the concern. "Did he bleed in the car?"

"Yes. The airbag deployed much harder then expected."

"What did you do?"

"I had Dmitri keep his shirt jammed up his nose to keep drops from hitting the ground while we got away. I also spent an extra minute at the scene spraying Lysol all over the airbag and passenger seat."

Grovenor spent a single second to contain the frustration and fear that welled up inside of him. He reminded himself about friction. Every operation in the history had small things go wrong. None of them spelled disaster, not unless one panics and makes stupid mistakes trying to fix them. Friction was unavoidable. All you could do is plan for all known contingencies and be prepared to adapt if you have to.

Dmitri was now a liaibility. His DNA could connect him to the slaying of two Gotham policemen, let alone the future operation that would lure the Special Forces into an ambush. And that meant Brezhnev could now be linked to it as well. And God alone knows if they might follow the lead to the mastermind of the plot.

Dmitri had to go. In the old days, Moscow Center would have taken him to a private place and shot him twice in the back of the neck. The old guard did not overvalue the lives of compromised agents. Brezhnev would understand and do what had to be done.

Calm once more, he said, "Understood. Ditch the hardware, take some long showers, and burn your clothes. I don't want anymore physical evidence linking you men to the shooting."

"Understood."

"Remain on stand by. No drinking. I estimate we have a day before the police find our lead and follow it to the warehouse. Also, send Dmitri to Brezhnev once you settled."

Ivan didn't respond for a long moment. "He is my cousin."

"He bled at the crime scene where two cops were murdered."

"I erased the evidence!"

"All of it? Every drip and splatter?"

Ivan was silent save for fierce, controlled breathing.

Grovenor said, "Sent him to Brezhnev."

Grovenor hung up. He relaxed once more into comfortable slouch. He lifted the remote and killed the obnoxious noise from the televison, then twisted in place to lay stretched out on the couch. He tried to get some sleep but it was a long time coming.

Even a hardened killer like him disliked sending a good man to his death.


	3. Chapter 3

The wheels were turning. The information was changing hands, working its way up through the ranks, from the patrolmen who called in the double homicide spreading to the highest levels of local government. Grovenor could almost feel the story he had written take hold and spread like a virus.

The next day, as predicted, SWAT teams hit the warehouse and secured it. The second wave of forensics personnel and detectives overran the site, collecting the information Grovenor had left for them.

Now it all depended on whether they'd kick it over into the "Batman".

Grovenor elected to risk some subtlety in the laptop. He careful to name two known terrorists in the emails on the laptop, but they were hardly household names. Gotham PD would not know them, and might not cross reference them with the NSA or CIA. But the Special Forces team's support staff certainly would. The search history included nothing overtly damning by itself- there was a lot of videos on Youtube of firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan captured on helmet cam, a lot of videos of IEDs blowing up American convoys. A propaganda website devoted to Chechen Jihadists. A Wikipedia chain of links that ended with the entry on dirty bombs, revisted multiple times. To add realism, he also clicked through several porn sites, visited a series of random newslinks that had no special significance, illegally downloaded the full run of three sitcoms, and had constantly monitered the stock market in an open tab.

There was also enough stocked food and soda to support five guys for weeks. Grovenor doubted the cops would note the significance of that before it was pointed out to them later.

And just to be cute, he arranged for one of the pistols used in the double slaying to be left in a hidey hole in the floor. It didn't fit into the story, but that was the point- it made things messy and weird. The cops and spooks know that in real life, incomprehensible clues come to light all the time, and it's rare to fit them in before the full story is known, and hard to understand even after it is explained. In real life, people do dumb and inexplicable things all the time. Especially criminals.

The fiction that Grovenor had penned was complete. The spooks were on the lookout for anything to do with Chechen thugs with connections to al Qaeda. It was a trick that Grovenor had used since the first day of playing the game; you had to make the opposition _want_ to believe you. You could fool a man who wanted to be fooled with almost no effort at all.

* * *

Grovenor spent the next two days letting the situation come to a simmer, and preparing his upcoming performance.

He was by nature and by design an average looking man, just five feet seven inches tall, 160 lbs. Brown hair with a very conventional haircut, brown eyes, clean shaven. That had to change. Low level Chechen thugs were not supposed to be able to pass for bankers.

He let his hair grew out an inch and then cut it himself with a pair of scissors and a mirror to bring any first impressions down a few social classes. He let some scruff color his chin. He stretched his face in the mirror for three hours, perfecting the look of slack jawed malevolence. This was the new him. A dullwitted thug, ignorant, sullen, petty and vicious. The sort of guy who grew up in a slum and mentally never left it. He had Brezhnev's men scour a thrift shop for second-hand clothes, because he was unwilling to risk any witnesses to him acquiring a proletariat wardrobe. He finally decided on a simple, smelly black tee shirt, blue jeans with frayed hems, a brown leather jacket, black sneakers, and sun shades. Because that's the kind of thing that a thug would think looked cool.

Grovenor stayed up the night before he turned himself into the police to perfect a look of bleary fear and confusion. He kept himself awake by going over his story in his head, acting out portions of it until dawn.

His name was Lom Shishani, the son of Chechen immigrants who escaped to the United States just before Stalin liquated the country. He was born in San Francisco about the same time as Grovenor was, and there was a birth certificate to prove it. (The birth certificate was actually genuine; however, the real Lom Shishani died three days after being born. Grovenor merely removed the death certificate from the official record). He had a passport, too, that was obtained with an actual social security number. The passport showed trips to Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, and Mexico. A quick and thorough online search by someone who knew what to look for would uncover connections with Chechen extremist groups. His sheet showed him to be a suspect in two different assault cases, neither one of which went to trial because the victims withdrew their suits. He was a known associate for three men currently in Blackgate Prison. All that was the paper trail. It had taken less than a week for Brezhnev to whip the new identity up and adjust the official records. A mobster could do a lot in a corrupt city like Gotham.

Grovenor then filled in the gaps in the record. The trip to Chechnya overlapped with the 1994 Chechen uprising against Russia. He wrote himself into that war; he had heard enough reports from old friends fighting on the Russian side to fake his way through any interrogation. This provided Lom with the opportunity to plausibly link himself with al Qaeda.

Fast forward a decade. Lom Shishani found himself broke and desperate- a gambling addiction was catching up to him, and even in Gotham there wasn't even work available for a low level thug to bail himself out. The bank account opened in his name showed him overdrawn by $200. Al Qaeda operatives contacted him with lucrative work...

* * *

And now Lom was in a room with bright lights and dull white tiles. He sat handcuffed to the metal table, facing a long mirror and two cops. Gone were his carefully chosen thug clothes- now he was wearing an bright orange jumpsuit.

The first cop, Renault, was old and fat, with thin white hair slicked to his dome by sweat. The second, Gordon, was about fifteen years younger and mostly looked tired, though his eyes held a gleam of intelligence through the lenses of his thick glasses. They seemed competent enough, for cops.

Renault asked, "What kind of work?"

"Security and transport, mostly," Lom answered. The first half hour after walking into the police station he had needed to moderate his accent to keep sounding slightly Chechen, but he was in the flow of it by now. For Gotham PD the accent was overkill, but the spooks might bring in experts to listen to the recordings. "Sayed payed me $2,000 up front to stand watch over a warehouse downtown for a couple of days. He said there'd by another five to baby sit a box from the harbor to the warehouse."

Gordon stared. Grovenor approved of the technique- he knew that often a witness would keep babbling on long after they should have shut up, if the interrogator simply stared at them and kept waiting. Lom kept babbling.

"I don't mind telling you," he said. "I needed that money bad. I sort of owed some men who you don't want to owe. That two grand was a life saver. I just killed time taking eight hour watches and then jacking off." Lom laughed. "Easiest money I ever made. But then I overheard Sayed talking on his phone about what was up."

Renault asked, "You never wondered before what the deal was?"

"What do I care? I was only interested the money. I trusted Sayed. He's an old family friend. If he needed me on security, for two grand, I was there. Who cares?"

Gordon asked, "And what changed?"

Lom hesitated, debating how much information he should give now and how much to keep in reserve. "I heard them talking about a dirty bomb set off on the streets of Gotham. Sayed said they had gotten some plutonium and would make a bomb to spread the radiation."

Gordon stared. Lob kept babbling. "I couldn't believe it. My old friend Sayed was going to nuke my own backyard. I knew he had made some shady friends, but I didn't think he was such an extremist."

"Sayed Nadir is not a nice man," Renault said. "We pulled his file from Interpol. He was implicated in the 2004 execution of three Italian reporters in Baghbad, as well as providing training for the perpetrators of the 2005 London Underground bombings. He's one of the rising stars in the terrorist world."

Grovenor mentally spat. There was no terrorist world. Extremists don't socialize with each other by inclination. They weren't the bad guys in some stupid western action film holding meetings and plotting world domination. They didn't care about anything other than their cause, which left no room for empathy for their fellow freaks and nutjobs. They could barely pay parking tickets, let alone collaberate on a global scale with their brethren. For every successful terrorist strike, there was a hundred, a thousand that failed. And they failed for the dumbest of reasons. Somebody forgetting the rifle at home. Blowing themsleves up in their bathtub. Not noticing the cop car parked by the bridge. Bragging about how badass they were on Facebook. Terrorists didn't have a "world" for the same reason toddlers don't; neither group is mature enough or organized enough to start one.

Lom said, "Yeah well, I didn't sign up to be a terrorist. You know? I kinda like Gotham. I keep all my shit here. I don't want to see this fine city get irradiated."

The interrogation dragged on for hours. The two cops kept picking at Lom's connection with Sayed Nadir until Grovenor let slip that he'd fought in Chechnya, in the streets of Grozny, along side the terrorist. That seemed to satisfy them.

They pressed him for the warehouses address, which they already knew. He gave that up quickly. And of course, they pressed him for the names of the four gunmen that had killed the police near Crime Alley. Lom demanded and recieved a slot in Witness Protection before giving the names and descriptions of four freelance enforcers working Gotham. Grovenor knew that lead was a dead end, because pieces of those men were already floating to the surface of Gotham harbor. This too was a relic of the old days, when anyone who could possibly contradict your lie would die before you told it.

Above all, they wanted where the bomb was heading if not the warehouse.

Lom smiled, trying for friendly but ending up sleazy. "Look, officers. I think we have an opportunity to help each other out here."

Gordon's face set in stone while his partner answered, "There's a terrorist threat to the city and you're holding out on us?"

"I'm just saying, man. I'm just saying. If the bomb had gone off and you guys were looking for the guys who did it, you'd be offering a reward. Seems to me like you'd be happy to to pay out _before_ the bomb went off, right? I mean, I'm sticking my neck out here. It doesn't seem right that I walk away from this with nothing."

Gordon said, "You'll have a new life in a new city. You'll have a clean break. Not many guys get something like that."

"A really touching sentiment, detective. But I want something I can put in the bank."

Gotham PD agreed to a $20,000 reward, to be payed out once Sayed Nadir was caught and the bomb neutralized. Lom held out for another hour trying to weasel them out of five grand in advance and fifteen when it was over, but the detectives stood their ground. Once Grovenor felt they had earned it, Lom divulged Sayed's safehouse on the west side. Lom had been there three weeks ago when Sayed had hired him.

Lom didn't know the route the bomb would take from the harbor to the safehouse, and he didn't know which dock it would arrive at. The only option his information left for the police was to hit the house once they saw someone enter it with a package.

* * *

Grovenor loved his job and loved his life. Days like these got him through the bad times. There was no sensation as exquisite as playing mind games and winning.


	4. Chapter 4

Lt. Gordon put a tracking beacon on him disguised as a pen, and had him back on the street less than an hour after they bought his story. They had wanted to put a wire on him, but Lom refused flat out, fearing for his life. He also had Gordon's work number plugged into his cell phone, under the name of "Hot Blonde at Starbucks". Grovenor liked that touch. In another world, Gordon could have made a good spymaster. He had the instincts if not the training for it.

Grovenor could tell that it killed the cop to let him out into circulation again. Lom Shishani wasn't a trained turncoat, a professional rat. There was no telling how reliable Lom would be under pressure. But remorseless logic drove Gordon to trust the Chechen. If one of Sayed's henchmen disappeared, there would be no way to know where the terrorist would go to ground next. The payoff of having a man on the inside outweighed the risks.

Grovenor allowed himself two seconds of self-congratulation once he hit the concrete outside the police station. Inventing cloak and dagger conspiracies out of whole cloth was not as easy as it seemed.

The day was overcast and slightly smoggy. A parade of humanity washed around him as he pushed his way east to the suburbs of Gotham. Businessmen, churchgoers, high schoolers, cops on patrol, yuppies, hippies, blue collar joes. They were all straights. They were blind to the nature of the world, and to the plots and schemes and filthy tricks that happened right under their noses.

Grovenor hated them all, though only in a low key, barely concious way. They were priveleged and self-satisfied and kept themselves deliberately ignorant, and Grovenor despised people who kept themselves stupid on purpose. Grovenor saved his sympathy for the crack whores, homeless, and gangbangers that also shared the street. They, at least, understood how the world worked. There were only two kinds of people in the world- the ones you could exploit, and the ones you left alone because they posed a threat to you. It was as true in the hills of Afghanistan as in the ghettos of Gotham. There's no more reason to dispute that worldview than there is to dispute gravity. A homeless woman understood it better than a housewife, because the homeless woman stayed up the night before making sure no one robbed her while she slept.

* * *

Once he returned to Sayed's safehouse- or, in the real world, the ambush site- he tossed the tracker it on the floor. The tracker was accurate to within twenty meters, so he could just slide it around every hour or so to keep things realistic.

Grovenor opened the fridge and got himself a bottle of Coke as he checked the time on the watch. Call it, oh, another five hours till the phony bomb came in. He had the safehouse to himself. He tapped out a call to Gordon.

"Hey, sexy, what's up?"

Grovenor almost broke character to laugh. Gordon had a chick cop on standby to answer his own phone. He wished that he had someone as dedicated to their craft backing him up in the old days.

"I'm alone right now. It's just me and two other guys, but I'm in the bathroom right now. Listen. The bomb's arriving some time tonight."

"When?" Now it was Gordon on the line.

"I don't know. I'll shoot you a text when I get word. No codes or nothing. Just, if you get a text from me, it's a warning that it's inbound. The second text means it's here."

"Understood." Gordon hung up.

Grovenor went to the equipment closet in the back room. Inside were several firearms, ready cash, and three untraceable cell phones with prepaid minutes already loaded. He picked one and called Brezhnev.

"Grovenor? What's the situation?"

"They bought it. Hook, liner, and sinker."

"Good. I'm sending Ivan and the others into position in the surrounding rooftops. Georgy and the boys are on their way to you at the safehouse."

"Excellent. Also, while I'm speaking to you. Has the Dmitry matter been solved yet?"

The briefest of pauses raised the hairs on the back of Grovenor's neck as Brezhnev responded, "Yes."

"Really? Permanently solved?"

Another pause, much longer this time. "Not how you mean. I am sending him out of town for a while. A long while, of course."

"Fuck! Fuck! God damn it, Benedikt!"

"Calm down."

Grovenor slammed his fist into the stucco wall, denting the soft material into a crater. "Why isn't that guy wearing a pair of concrete shoes? His blood is at a crime scene."

"You are paranoid, Grovenor. This is Gotham. Evidence here vanishes when I tell it to vanish. The police here are even more corrupt than the ones back home. There is nothing they can make stick to Dmitry, and I will not kill him just in case."

"You're putting my ass on the line. He slips up, and they put pressure on you. They put pressure on you, who knows what you give them for ten years off your sentence!"

"_Shut up_."

Grovenor heard the snarl in Brezhnev's voice. The last time he had heard it, Brezhnev had been torturing a _mujahedeen._ He shut up and listened.

"This is not Afghanistan, and you're not in charge here. You do not wave a hand like a king and tell me which of my men I must kill. I decide who lives, and who dies. And I say Dmitri lives. He's a good man, and an assest to our organization. And I say that the threat he poses is minimal. Your job, Kuznetsov, or Grovenor, or whoever you are, is to kill the Batman. Focus on that and leave personnel decisions to me. Do you understand me?"

Grovenor dented the wall again, hurting his hand, but kept his voice even. "I understand."

"Good. Georgy should be there in ten minutes. You have operational control. Make sure you obtain at least two bodies when the Special Forces attack. We need to be able to blow the lid on the conspiracy, not merely kill a few individuals. We must produce evidence that the United States government is behind the Bat."

"I understand. But remember- the police might have decided to cover this on there on."

"You said the bait as perfect."

Grovenor snorted. "There's no such thing as perfect. If it's just a SWAT team, we'll shoot them up and run. That'll prime the pump for the next trap, which the Green Berets will be forced to respond to."

"Alright. Happy hunting, Grovenor."

"Good bye, Brezhnev."

Grovenor disconnected, and said, "Go fuck yourself, Brezhnev."

* * *

The walkie talkie crackled. "Boss, this is Gargoyle. Spot to the south."

Grovenor snapped up from the couch in the safehouse's living room and grabbed the walkie talkie. He stalked to the window facing south. "Talk me on."

"Garage rooftop. Two story house with the wide windows, SUV in driveway."

Grovenor peered out through the blinds and spotted the house Ivan described. The streetlamp on the street glowed a low, sickly yellow, but didn't reach the garage. "Contact garage, but no joy."

"I have eyes on with thermals."

"Describe the target. Is it a Bat?"

"Standby."

Grovenor kept his eyes fixed above the white garage door, staring into sheer blackness. Whoever was up there was absolutely motionless.

He spoke to Georgy and his gunmen over his shoulder without breaking eye contact with the garage. "Safeties off. We might have some action soon."

He heard the clicks and clacks of seven guns being checked and prepped.

"Boss, Gargoyle."

"Send it, Gargoyle."

"I can only get a clear view of part of his face. I think he's wearing some kind of suit that's dampening his heat signature."

Grovenor closed his eyes and regulated his breathing. It was them. The Special Forces. The "Batman" was here. The technology was a dead giveaway. _Chyort_, with suits designed to defeat night optics it was a miracle the man on that rooftop had been spotted in time. But you couldn't get excited. Excited agents make mistakes. Calm agents win everytime. Control the breaths. In and out.

"I copy. Keep your eyes on. Don't lose him."

"I can take the shot from here. Easy."

"Negative, negative. His friends are out there somewhere. We wait until they show themselves."

"Copy."

The American on the garage rooftop is an absolute pro. Grovenor didn't see so much of a twitch in the darkness.

He raised the walkie talkie to his mouth and said, "Gargoyle, Boss."

"Send it."

"Keep two pairs of eyes to the north of the street too."

"Copy."

Grovenor left the window and inspected his kill team. He made sure every window and door had a rifle pointed at it, then he went back to watching above the garage.

They had an advance scout in place. They must be manuevering onto the house somehow. But from where? North and south were covered by Ivan's sniper teams. Georgy had a clear field of view east and west.

Think outside the box. How else could they get at us? Air insertion through the roof? But we would hear the chopper. Burrow down and come up from underground? Impossible.

Minutes passed. He saw beads of sweat dripping down his kill team's faces as they scanned their sectors. A lifetime spent reading faces left him with no doubt- his men were scared. Not just nervous, but actually scared. The Bat's hold on their imaginations was tighter and surer then expected. He tried to think of something to say, some speech to give that would give them their edge back and put them in the zone, but nothing sprang to mind.

He wanted to spit once he realized he was scared too. Of what? God damn it, what was there to be scared of? The Bat wasn't real, and he had a plan to deal with the flesh and blood men who were coming. This wasn't the first time warriors had stalked him in the darkness.

No. He was scared because they clearly had a plan and he couldn't suss them out. Natural to be nervous. Adds an edge to his performance on the battlefield, that's all. Maybe that was their game plan. They'd exposed one scout just to make us jumpy, and then froze their tempo to wear us out worrying when they'd come. The real attack would come after all the guards were exhausted and complacent.

Nonsense. They had no way to know we were laying for them, and no way to be sure their observer on the garage roof would be seen. Paranoia was betraying him.

Grovenor realized he was tapping his foot rapidly. He stopped.

This was ridiculous. He had set up a big housewarming party, but no one was showing up on time. Why weren't they coming to him. His bait was impeccable.

Something went wrong. The thought punctured his usual self-confidence. Something went wrong, and this plan won't work. Grovenor quelled the doubt. He was the best freelance espionage agent on the market. He held the trump cards. He would win.

"Boss, the is Gargoyle. I just lost the target on the garage."

"Say again?"

"He's gone. I don't have a heat sig up there anymore."

Grovenor swore and jogged for the south-facing window. "Were you watching him or not?"

"Yes, but he just disappeared!"

Grovenor muttered, "Useless fucking shit." He keyed his walkie talkie and said, "Keep scanning south and north."

He peered at the rooftop of the garage and gasped. Smoke tendrils were fading into the circle of light around the streep lamp. They seemed to be drifting down from the roof.

"Gargoyle, Boss, be advised, enemy has used smoke to cover his exfil."

"Copy."

Grovenor paced away from the window and drew his pistol from its holster. He double checked to make sure a round was in the chamber and flicked the safety off.

Long, painful minutes passed.

One of Georgy's gunmen fired off a long burst. Someone else did too. The air stank of sweat, fear, and gunpowder. He contacted George over the radio.

"King, this is Boss, report! Who's shooting at what?

"We hear them on the roof. Yevgeny shot through hoping to hit them."

The roof? Fuck, who did they get up there? Every route was covered!

"King, have the men double up in teams, no one is to be isolated! I am coming down the hallway, hold fire."

Once he linked up with his kill team, he contacted Ivan. "Gargoyle, are you copying this? Possible enemy on our rooftop."

Nothing.

"Gargoyle, Boss, radio check. God fucking damn it. Georgy, try and raise Gargoyle, my walkie talkie is down."

"No, it's not. I heard you through mine. They're just not answering."

The two men locked eyes for a split second as they mulled over a theory why Ivan wouldn't answer. Grovenor snarled in frustration.

One of the gunman screamed and emptied his mag at full auto down the hall Grovenor had just entered from. The rifle was inches from Grovenor's left ear and his was completely deafened, knocked half senseless by the concussive forces slaming into his eardrum. He recovered just in time to see a small grenade no bigger than a baby's fist rolled by his feet and detonate.

Thick, coarse, sour smoke filled the room in just a few heartbeats. The whole team was sucking it in, coughing it out, gagging on it. It felt like lemon juice on the eyes and hot pepper spray in the throat.

The next few seconds were like a hallucination. Georgy charged out of the cloying black mist down the hallways. He met a demon halfway, a looming figure with bat wings and wide, white eyes. They fought briefly until the former Spetsnaz had his forehead slammed through the wall. More gunfire demolished Grovenor's right ear drum as panicked killers tried to slay the Bat that was coming for them.

Grovenor struggled to rise, but his comrades were bunched up around him, stepping on him, impeding him. The Bat had brought utter howling chaos to Grovenor's structured operation.

Grovenor crawled, coughing and snarling, away from the smoke. Away from the Bat. Back to the living room that the smoke hadn't got to yet. Behind him he heard fighting. Gunshots. Once, he heard what might have been bones shattering, if that wasn't just his imagination.

He was free from the smoke now. He hauled himself to his knees and went for his pistol.

And a gloved hand grabbed his gunhand with a grip of iron.

He spun around and faced Gotham's terror in the face. Its face was black as tar, misshapen, with inhumanly thin ears. The arms were spiked and swollen. But the eyes burned white in the darkness.

Grovenor dropped the pistol to the floor. The Bat kicked it away.

"I give up," Grovenor whispered. "Please don't hurt me."

The Bat seemed to glare before letting him loose. The second he was free, Grovenor punched him in the face as hard as he could, twisting his hips to create more striking power. The blow might have killed a lesser man, but the Bat merely staggered back and sagged a little.

Grovenor sprang to the gun and swept it up as the Bat charged him. He lined up the sights to Batman's center of mass and pulled the trigger.

He couldn't believe it when his enemy ignored the bullet and got to him anyway. An armor piercing .45 round should have killed any armored opponent in the world.

The Bat struck Grovenor in the gut hard enough to make him drop the gun form nerveless fingers. The second blow to the jaw dropped him to the floor like a corpse. He scrambled for the gun again in what felt like slow motion, until the Bat reached down and broke Grovenor's right wrist.


	5. Chapter 5

He sat in the white interrogation room, staring blankly at the one way glass. His wrist was bundled up with white plaster, hanging from a sling on his chest. It might have been the same room from before, when he was wearing Lom Shishani's name and history. They now knew that identity was fake, but they had nothing to replace it with. Three separate cops had tried to talk to him, to dangle treats and bandy threats to make him give up his employer. After the first two days of fruitless interrogation, they had lowered their goals to make him say anything at all. He had not spoken a single word since he as arrested.

It was his last shred of professional pride, to not talk, to not give the opposition the satisfaction of knowing who he was. Torture could break anyone, given enough time, but these policemen did not have the stomach. He would remain an enigma out of spite.

No matter how much agony radiated from his wrist, the pain of failure was worse. Grovenor had never realized how much of his identity he had invested in his profession. Losing a game that had been stacked in his favor was more than shameful and humiliating, it was disorienting.

Grovenor didn't know who he was anymore. He was just an old, broken guy who could... what? His expertise now seemed pitifully quaint and outdated. The world didn't need him the way he thought it did. As far back as his days in East Berlin he had always felt needed.

* * *

On the other side of the glass, the police where making some headway. Stones that their subject had thought long buried were being turned.

A certain costumed vigilante had lent his help to the investigation.

Facts appeared. It was believed that the mercenary was the same one spotted by the FBI agents watching Benedikt Brezhnev. The FBI had not suspected Brezhnev of any specific scheme, but the Organized Crime section had the budget to keep the big players under surveillance. Tracking the gangster's guest backwards to his hotel and flight info led to an alias. That alias was tagged as a deactivated Soviet identity from before 1990.

This connected Grovenor to his old job. Tapping CIA archives provided more intelligence.

The CIA had information on him from his East Berlin, Leningrad, and Afghanistan exploits. The CIA chief for Southwest Asia had codenamed him "The Beast" in recognition of his ruthlessness. But it was limited on personal details. The last update on his file was in 1991 when the Soviet Union felll; it was practically copied and pasted directly from the Kremlin's declassified records.

He was born Anatoli Knyazev, in Athens, Greece. Greek mother, Russian father. Both were passionate communists with dreams of world liberation from the bourgeoisie. Anatoli's parents had run Soviet agents in and out of Greece just before the Nazis stormed the country in the Second World War. Espionage was the family business.

His father was executed by the Fascists. His mother died of lung cancer after the war, just after Anatoli got in contact with the KGB recruiter.

His psychological profile was interesting material. He had an almost pathological distaste for people, and yet an equal yearning to fit in to a group dynamic. His training was altered to indoctrinate him into identifying with the Motherland in general and his fellow agents in particular. The result was an agent that could never be seduced or intimidated by outside influences. He had the personality to take the poison to avoid capture, solely to frustrate his enemy. In Knyazev, they had forged a weapon that would never question why someone outside the tribe needed to die, would never hesitate to alter his own personality to fit his role, and who would never, ever give in to someone he perceived as an enemy.

Armed now with his past, the Gotham PD connected him with some of the more shadowed Russian mob schemes in the last few years.

Their invasion into Grovenor's history had actually cowed them. Gordon, for one, did not believe they had the tools to break him. They could lay out everything they had learned in an effort to shock him into speaking, but Gordon doubted it would worked. Knyazev would just glance down at the file they had created, lift his gaze again, and maintain his silence.

In one sense, it didn't matter if he talked or not. They had other, less stubborn prisoners to work on, and they only needed one to rat on Brezhnev. Knyazev could rot in prison for all they cared. Secretly, Gordon was glad that it wouldn't be Knyazev who got the plea deal. The world was safer with that freak behind bars.

* * *

Grovenor was unaware of how much his enemies had learned about him. He remained focused on one thing.

The Bat.

How had he miscalculated so badly? Was there truly just one man in body armor terrorizing the criminals of Gotham? The more he reviewed that night, the more convinced he became. There had been enough time between losing visual contact with him on the roof of the garage and the assault on the house for him to have taken out the sniper team. And there had only been one man who attacked the gunmen at the house.

But, Jesus Christ, _how?_ One man without weapons couldn't take on a squad of Spetsnaz!

But he had. Grovenor would never have believed it if he hadn't been there to see it. To feel the blows land on him.

There really was just one guy in a Bat suit. It was utterly, intolerably, inconceivably ridiculous. And it was the only possible explanation.

There was only one option left. He had received some training on escaping captivity, though he'd never put it to the test. He had contacts everywhere. Blackgate prison couldn't hold him.

He'd hunt the Bat again. But this time the advantage would be his. This time he knew his enemy. This time he'd prove to the world that he was still the best in the game.

Fuck Brezhnev. And fuck Gotham. He would kill the Bat for himself.

He knew he was violating one of his rules. He was making it personal. He was bringing emotion into it. He didn't care. He could no more drop the matter and walk away than he could choose to stop breathing.

The Bat would die so that Grovenor could survive living with himself. It was as simple as that.


End file.
